Read the complete story or download it at www.SomethingCosmic.com
First collaboration, as the writer!
I’ve been toying with this idea of doing another issue of Upsetting. The original book was done as a one-off, just for fun and laughs. But having made it, and having gotten so much positive feedback, I keep thinking it might be fun to do another.
Trouble is, making a book is a TON of work. I estimate the last issue, including creating every story and the magazine layout work itself, took me over 600 hours. That was doable since I had taken a year off of work and made making comics my job for a few months. But can I do it again while also working? Jury’s still out.
Of course, one way to tip the scales in my favor is to not do it all myself this time. A friend I met on the Robert Norton Discord channel, Matthew Green, hit me up with just that idea. Specifically, what if I wrote a story for someone else (i.e., him) to draw?
A page from the script. For better or worse, I use screenplay formatting. You can check out the original script here
Truth be told, the idea had crossed my mind before, but I never thought anyone would want to draw any silly story I would write. Especially if there is no page rate attached. Also, I generally consider myself more of an artist than a writer, so if ever I was going to be on just one side of the equation, I figured I’d be illustrating.
Still, I didn’t make Upsetting #77 to tell other people’s stories. So, I think writing (or at least coming up with the story) is the immovable part of the process for me. And thankfully, there are reasons for artists to write other people’s stories. Maybe it’s for the practice, maybe for the portfolio, maybe it’s just to make a comic and avoid the heavy up-front task of coming up with a plot and writing the script. But yeah, whatever the motivations were for Matt, he signed up for the work!
And I’m glad he did! As you can see, it turned out great! Also it was just a fun experience. I’d never collaborated in that way before. Writing a script specifically for someone else has its own considerations. The stage directions in my script can’t rely on ideas that only I would understand, for example. To aid in the process, I even threw together some ultra rough layouts, so that Matt could at least get some sense of what I was imagining.
Rough layouts, left. Final illustrations, right. See here for more rough layouts
The picture above shows an example of some of the visual ideation I provided for Matt. In this example, he stuck to the layouts very closely, but in other cases, he came up with his own ideas, adding details that I hadn’t though of, and new panel work that suited his style perfectly. That’s the beauty of collaboration. Each person brings their own voice and ideas to the table, and in the end you have a work that no contributor would have thought to create on their own. And when it works, such as it did for us, the whole is greater for it.
So yeah - Thank you Matt for your part in bringing this story to life! It was a fun, interesting, and productive (we finished it!) experience. And with this in hand, I am one step closer to putting together Upsetting #78. It might actually happen!